Thursday, April 14, 2011

John Carter, Warlord of Mars Annual #2 - 1978

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"Gale!" by Bill Mantlo and Ernie Chan.

John Carter, Dejah Thoris, Tars Tarkas, and others find themselves caught in a massive sandstorm:
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What in the Holy Hell is this place? Headless slaves?!?

Carter immediately decides to try and help free the slaves, but first stops to eat some fruit dangling from a nearby tree. While doing so, he sees a Martian warrior about to be attacked by a She-Banth (a lion-type creature)!

As Carter fights it off, he sees that the warrior's head has come completely off his body! The head then grows a set of spindly legs(ewww!), waddling back over to its host body and reconnecting itself.

A pack of She-Banths, alerted by the noise of the battle, begin to approach. Carter kills the first attacker, throwing its corpse at the rest, who get distracted by the more easily-available meat. Carter prepares to escape to safety, when he is grabbed by a Giant White Ape!:
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...man, who knew Bill Mantlo could write something this ghoulishly crazy? This is like John Carter crossed with Re-Animator!

Anyway, the brain operation is performed, and the new hosts awaken with their new brains. The original brain of Tal Tarag was then put into the body of the white ape.

Awaking to this realization, Tal went mad, stealing the brain of his beloved Vala Dia (kind of understandable, really, given the circumstances), hopped in a flier and set a course for Bantoom, hoping to force the mad scientist to return them to normal.

Carter, horrified at this tale, vows to help:
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Carter and his allies continue fighting, but the Kaldanes outnumber them. He then jumps above the fray, apprehending the two red-skinned transplantees. Hiding in a nearby room, they take a moment to regroup and plan.

But before they can even do that, they are met by another horror: Taak, the King of Bantoom, who is nothing more than a giant head with tendrils coming out of it, headed right for them!!:

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...man, the guys back in Helium are never gonna believe this!


As you can see from the pages I posted, this is one batsh*t crazy story, something that I could have seen if Marvel had done a John Carter black and white magazine (oh, if only...). While dressed up in sci-fi trappings, the horror quotient of this story is pretty graphic, and a little surprising it made it past the Code (although of course we don't know what, if any, material got changed).

Sure, this story is very similar to the plot of the first Annual (i.e., John Carter ends up in a faraway corner of Mars, disconnected from any of the goings on in the main book's storyline), that can be forgiven when the story is as profoundly weird as this one. It moves at a great clip, and is well rendered by Ernie Chan.


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